Luke Bryan is opening up about sister Kelly Bryan’s sudden death in 2007.
“I’ve never really explained what happened to my sister,” Luke, 49, said during the Tuesday, October 28, episode of CNN podcast’s All There Is with Anderson Cooper. “There’s some misinformation out there on the internet, and I think some people kind of wonder what happened and think that we’ve tried to cover it up.”
The musician revealed her cause of death for the first time. “But there is a very, very small percentage of people that die for no reason in the world,” he said. “And it’s called sudden death syndrome and that’s essentially what they described my sister’s death as she was in her home doing her laundry, and it was Anderson, it was like, you know, somebody just turned the switch off on her and it was just tragic beyond words.”
When asked whether it took “awhile” to receive the diagnosis for his sister, Luke replied, “Yeah, yeah, obviously, we wanted to know what had happened because there was so much, there was just so much unanswered questions. And we wanted to know, could there be a family history of something that her children might have or may have?”
While Luke noted that “typical findings of an autopsy” for someone Kelly’s age would be “an aneurysm or an embolism or a blood clot,” he explained that “everything was inconclusive” surrounding her death.
“She had a pretty severe, like, orbital bone injury,” he said. “So whether she fainted or not, I think she may have went into the floor and kind of knocked herself out. My nephew was 3 at the time.”
Luke said that if “someone could have been there, maybe her chances of surviving” could have “been a lot better.”
“She really was everything in our lives,” he continued. “She was a mother of three children and she was, I mean, the best mother you could ever dream of. And we all leaned on her for so many things and it’s hard to really wrap your brain around her being gone.”
After her death, Luke said he doesn’t “know how to vocalize what [he] was feeling” the morning of the funeral.
“I mean, the nausea. I did not want to go in the funeral home and see my sister. I was just really … not not processing this well. And the fact that I knew at 5:00 p.m I was going to walk in that funeral home and have to deal with this — it was just really I just wasn’t doing well with it,” he recalled. “And we get in a car and it’s the sensation you get in the car and that this has got to happen.”
When Luke walked into the room, the singer — who described himself as a “pretty spiritual guy” who is “pretty grounded in my belief in Christ and Christianity” — said it was the “first time” in his life where he felt a “spirit of another world take away my burden.”
“When I saw her, it was like something, it was almost like a pressure valve released,” he explained. “And I just feel like between … I don’t, I can’t explain it. It was truly like she let – she set me free in that room. My mother did not have that experience and I think I was the only one in the family that had that experience.”
Seven years after Kelly’s death, her husband, Ben Cheshire, died of a heart attack. Luke went on to adopt the pair’s three children: Jordan, Kris and Tilde. (Luke and his wife, Caroline Bryan, are also parents of Thomas “Bo”, 17, and Tatum “Tate”, 15.)
“It’s just what you do as family,” he explained. “And I guess you go into a tribe instinct and you do what you can to kind of make it … But Til it wasn’t necessarily an adoption more like we were, we had to sign paperwork that he’s our responsibility. And watching him come into our home and have to grieve the loss of his dad was really, really tough. And to watch my wife step up and do the work that she had to do was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen.”
Through it all, Luke explained that “you have to find silver linings” and “appreciate” them.
“My oldest Bo and Til, I mean, it is all brotherly. It looks and smells just like two brothers complaining and fighting and wrestling and giving each other a hard time,” he said. “But with Tate, my 15-year-old and Til, they have a really special bond, and I can’t imagine a household where Til would have never grown up in it. And, I mean, it’s just been a blessing and a silver lining to have him and to watch the girls go through life and become mothers and… and get through life daily has been pretty inspiring too. I’m really proud of them.”
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